About our student and instructor materials
Frequently, instructors tell me that they like our books the best, but can't adopt because we don't have any student materials.
But we do!
We just package our student materials differently so they're not always printed at the ends of the chapters in the book. To some extent, we also package our instructor's materials differently. So let me tell you more about what we offer.
The student materials
Practice exercises and student projects
For most of our books, the primary student materials are programming exercises and/or projects that your students can use to practice the skills they're learning, either on their own or in class.
The exercises are more limited and offer more guidance for the students. And there may be exercises for all of the chapters in a book or for just a few, depending on how much support the students need. For example, in more advanced courses, we find that once students have done exercises for the early chapters, they're ready for something more demanding.
That's where the student projects come in. More extensive and open-ended than the exercises, they test how well your students can develop applications from scratch and apply what they've learned in new contexts.
As a result, these projects often cover the material in two or more chapters, giving your students some idea of what real-world work is like. And they often build on projects in earlier chapters so that students get practice in enhancing applications, as they'll have to do on the job.
As I said earlier, these materials are often packaged
differently than they are in competing books. Sometimes
the exercises are printed at the ends of the chapters,
sometimes they're on the Instructor's
CD for the book, and sometimes they can be downloaded
from our web site. To provide the most practice in the
least time, we supply the starting code for most of
these exercises.
That way, students can focus on practicing their new
skills without having to repeat routine coding.
As for the projects, they're always on the Instructor's CDs rather than printed in the books. That way, you can modify them to suit the aptitudes and progress of your students.
Other types of student materials
In general, we don't provide student materials like review questions and practice tests because we think that a student's time is better spent in other ways. In particular, the programming IDEs are so good today that the best way for students to build their understanding and skills is to actually use the software in the computer lab or on their own PCs. That's why we see our exercises and projects as the critical components that test students' aptitude and prepare them for professional work.
The required software
Nowadays, most of the software your students will need is available to them for free from the vendor web site. If you're ever interested in packages that include the book and the required software, though, please contact us.
For our .NET books, your students can
download Express editions of the applicable software
for free from Microsoft's web site. So they won't have
to buy any software to use our C++, C#, Visual Basic,
ASP.NET, ADO.NET, and SQL Server books. The appendices
in these books give the students the installation details
they need.
For our Java books, your students can
download the Java software they need for free from the
Sun Microsystems web site. Likewise, the additional
components they need for developing desktop or web applications
in Java are available for free from various vendor web
sites. The opening chapters in each book give detailed
instructions for downloading and installing all the
required components.
For Mainframe COBOL, you can contact
Micro Focus
for details on its Academic ConnecTIONs (ACTION) Program, which allows your
students access to the Micro Focus Net Express software.
Net Express is a modern IDE and COBOL compiler that
lets the students enter, edit, compile, test, and step
through COBOL code on their own PCs, without having
to deal with the complexities of a mainframe or midrange
system. To help your students get the most from this
product, we offer a free Net Express tutorial and a
special set of exercises that are designed for Net Express.
Of course, your students can also use our COBOL book with any standard COBOL compiler on any type of system.
In general, the Instructor's CD for a book provides everything else you need for running an effective course. That usually includes:
- Instructional objectives by chapter
- PowerPoint slides
- All of the book's applications so you can demonstrate them in class
- All of the student materials so you can distribute them in class
- Solutions to the exercises
- Projects that ask the students to build applications from scratch
- Solutions to the projects
- Test banks
To find out exactly what components are available for each book, please go to the Books and Instructor's CDs link and click on the book title. Then, if you still have questions or you need something else, please contact us.
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